In the six essays of this book, Ksana Blank examines affinities among works of nineteenth and twentieth-century Russian literature and their connections to the visual arts and music. Blank demonstrates that the borders of authorial creativity are not stable and absolute, that talented artists often transcend the classifications and paradigms established by critics. Featured in the volume are works by Alexander Pushkin, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, Vladimir Nabokov, Daniil Kharms, Kazimir Malevich, Mstislav Dobuzhinsky, and Dmitri Shostakovich.

Ksana Blank is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University. She is the author of Dostoevsky’s Dialectics and the Problem of Sin (2010).

Reviews

An interdisciplinary creative space is a complex thing. It is home not only to plot, language, structure, but also to whole worlds. In this provocative collection of essays, Ksana Blank shows us some unexpected corners of these worlds: the great Realist novelists shunning the railroad, Shostakovich finding poetry in Dostoevsky, the absurdist Kharms weighing in on a religious controversy, Dobuzhinsky becoming a visual chronicler of Petersburg, Tolstoy anticipating the thinking of Malevich, and Nabokov’s nymphet drowning in Pushkinian subtexts. Works we know by heart are estranged and refreshed by these resourceful angles of vision.

— Caryl Emerson, Princeton University

Addressing the minor themes in great writers, Ksana Blank demonstrates her talent for telling fascinating stories with surprising conclusions. She achieves the effect of theoretical estrangement: what seemed all too familiar in Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky or Nabokov, reveals its paradoxical side. This book shows that the art of defamiliarization is no less important for literary studies than for literature itself.